Leonard Pitts: New dawn rises in U.S.

How fitting that Richard Blanco chose
the sun. A 44-year-old poet raised in Miami, the first Cuban-American and the
first openly gay person ever to deliver a presidential inauguration poem, he
used the earth star to frame his composition, One Today at the ceremony before
the U.S. Capitol.

Blanco found poetic significance in
tracing the many disparate American lives, the truck drivers and
schoolchildren, the waitpersons and accountants, upon whom it sheds light
during its daily trek across the sky.

But there’s another reason Blanco’s
choice made sense. The dawn is the symbolic beginning of the new day and thus,
the symbolic end of the old.

Keep that in mind as people parse Barack
Obama’s second inaugural address. Keep it in mind as they debate What It All
Means that he has adopted a more combative stance toward Republicans in
Congress, that he sang the praises of liberal values, that he apparently became
the first president in history to take a stand for — or even mention — gay
rights during an inaugural address.

Keep it in mind as Republicans piously
declaim Obama’s failure to seek common ground with them, conveniently
forgetting that every time over the last four years the president reached a
hand out to them, he drew back a nub.

Keep it in mind, because Blanco was,
perhaps, righter than he knew when he invoked an inclusive new American dawn,
with its implied farewell to an exclusionary American yesterday.

Indeed, a collective shiver climbed
through some of us when the president invoked places made sacred by the freedom
crusades they saw.

“We, the people,” he said, “declare
today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is
the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca
Falls and Selma and Stonewall.”

There was more to that passage than
sibilant alliteration. There was also a reminder that there was nothing
predestined about this American dawn, that we come to it by way of struggle and
blood, courage and vision.

Yesterday, 1848, at Seneca Falls in New
York, 300 people convened to advance the radical idea that women are fully
equal human beings.

Yesterday, 1965, at Selma, in Alabama,
African-Americans had their bones broken and bodies bloodied to put forward the
radical idea that they were American citizens who deserved the right to vote.

Yesterday, 1969, at The Stonewall Inn, a
bar in Greenwich Village, gay people rioted and protested to drive home the
radical idea that they had the right to be left the hell alone.

These are some of the yesterdays that
have made up this today. And as much as Obama’s speech was a political
document, it was also a needed statement of principle at a time when some of us
seem determined to repeal progress, a time when battles about women’s rights,
voting rights and gay rights have again become — or in the case of gay people,
remain — as fresh as tomorrow’s headlines.

Indeed, much of the Republican Party’s
appeal — this was starkly clear in last year’s campaign — boils down to an
implicit pledge to restore yesterday.

To which the best response may be a hymn
the civil rights marchers once sang: “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.”
Wish though they will and try though they might, the GOP will not roll back change.
One hopes they will finally get that clear.

The president’s inaugural address drove
nails into the coffin of a dead era when progress and power, rights and right
were reserved for those who were male, those who were white, those who were
straight. It remains to be seen what actions he will put to his words, what new
forms of obstruction his political opponents will take.

But the message itself was clear. We
stand together in the promise of a new dawn.

And yesterday is gone.

LEONARD
PITTS writes for the Miami Herald. His column is distributed by Tribune Media
Services Inc. His e-mail address is lpitts@herald.com.

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